Perform a Pardot Automation Audit & Start Getting More Value

One of the core reasons MarCloud Consulting was founded was because I quickly realised that so many businesses are paying a huge sum of money on Pardot automation, yet aren’t taking advantage of the huge range of automation features that are available.

I’ve seen some companies essentially using it as an email distribution platform, which is the equivalent of paying for Sky when you only watch BBC1. It’s fine if your business just wants to send emails but if that’s the case then save yourself some money and opt for a basic platform such as MailChimp. However, if you want to really align your marketing & sales departments and reinvent the way your business thinks about lead nurturing, then you need to start making the most of Pardot automation.

To be in the best position to extract the most value from Pardot, you should perform an audit of your account. This will allow you to understand the areas in which you are performing well and identify where you need to improve. Too many businesses fail to do this and as a result, Pardot remains underutilised and can become a burden on company finances.

“Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go” – James Baldwin

An audit isn’t as painful as it sounds and will be incredibly valuable. The audit will enable you to see how everything is working together so that you can then shift your focus to executing engagement programs which generate sales.

“Good filing means good dialing”

Admin sucks. It’s time-consuming, your team will find it boring and a lot of the time it seems like a whole lot of work for a whole lot of nothing. However, this isn’t the case with Pardot. Really thinking about your filing structure and hierarchy of content can make a massive difference to your sales by qualifying leads and allocating precise scoring.

Let me add some context:

This is pretty much a visual representation of why your salespeople will love you if you put the time in with your admin. The left side is an example of what is fairly common amongst Pardot users. If a clear folder structure hasn’t been created, then you’ll be missing out on valuable insights, like scoring categories. You can see that the prospect is engaged, but what are they engaged in? You could find out by digging through their prospect record, however, that would be very time consuming and time costs you money. Your conclusion from this would be that they are interested in something, but you don’t know what salesperson should speak to them or what to talk to them about.

Tip: Pardot defaults to filing assets within the ‘Uncategorised’ folder. Make sure you change this when creating new files.

The example on the right-hand side of the image is a beautifully structured filing system where the Pardot user has segmented the products into different scoring categories. Now, let’s say a prospect repeats the same actions as the prospect in the left example. We now have clear visibility of what they’re engaged in, which is the exciting part. All you have to do go to their prospect record and you’ll be able to see that they are showing a strong interest in product C. Either send them some more content related to that product or get a salesperson who specialises in product C to call them ASAP!

These insights are invaluable to a salesperson and they’ll appreciate you spending a few hours a month on your admin. The exciting part to all this is that it doesn’t just provide a valuable insight, there’s a whole load of other Pardot automation you can build off of scoring categories, but I’ll save that for another blog…

When you’re close to giving up on the admin, remember that keeping things simple can save/make you a lot of money in the long run.

“The height of sophistication is simplicity.”- Clare Boothe Luce

A Pardot automation audit doesn’t just look at your filing system…

There’s a little more to this than just looking at how you’re storing assets on Pardot. You’ll want to scrutinise how you are segmenting and managing your data, revisiting the scoring and grading parameters to check they’re still relevant, considering how often each type of prospect is being emailed, analyse all of your engagement suites and so on.

One important thing to note after you run a Pardot audit on your account is that you should be setting deadlines for each of the actionable tasks that come from the audit. This will help keep you on track and prevent delays. You’ll want to be doing this once a quarter so don’t let the tasks from the previous quarter creep into the next, you’ll thank yourself for it.

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Tom is a is a Salesforce Certified Pardot Consultant and has a passion for all things marketing automation. He's written blogs for Pardot.com and MarketingProfs.com, featured in a Pardot e-book and hosted a webinar with Pardot on custom form templates and landing pages.